Club Med: Straw Huts, a Rothschild Rescue and a Fosun Bidding War

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Club Med began in 1950 as a low-cost summer tent colony run by Belgian entrepreneur Gerard Blitz, first on Majorca and then in Djerba, Tunisia, built around sports, nature and social equality. Blitz charged too little to cover his costs and was bankrupt by 1953. His main creditor, tent supplier Gilbert Trigano, known as the King of Camping, took control and in 1954 opened a village in Palinuro, Italy, where guests slept in straw huts with no electricity and shared bathrooms. When expansion costs threatened collapse again, Baron Edmond de Rothschild invested in 1961 after visiting a resort.

Club Med expanded to Tahiti by 1965 and to Guadeloupe and Martinique, launched the Mini Club for children in 1967, adopted the short Club Med name for North America in 1974, and built the five-masted Club Med II. It became a for-profit company in 1995. Shareholders ousted the Triganos in 1997, and new CEO Philippe Bourguignon added gyms, urban Club Med World venues in Paris and Montreal, and a youth brand called Oyo before losses and the 2001 travel collapse. Henri Giscard d'Estaing closed those ventures and moved upscale, with over $530 million in renovations in 2006 and 2007. A bidding war that began in 2013 ended with Fosun International buying the company for 939 million euros.

• Club Med opened winter ski villages in Switzerland as early as 1956.
• The sailing ship Vendredi 13 was refitted for cruises out of Martinique.
• Greek unions reported understaffing, crowded staff buses, kitchens without air conditioning and unpaid agency wages at the Gregolimano resort.
• May 1968 graffiti in Paris called Club Med a cheap holiday in other people's misery, a line echoed by the Sex Pistols.
• The name inspired the phrase Club Fed for minimum security prisons housing white collar convicts.